Album Review: Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You really Feel

Editor's Rating

This album is personal, intimate, and enthralling yet has a powerful enervating anthemic pulse: it rocks with intelligence and sensitivity.

8.4

Marathon Artists and Milk! Records

Courtney Barnett is swiftly developing global adulation for her low-fi, heartfelt vignettes of life which capture with great honesty her trials and tribulations and insecurities. Like Jonathan Richman, there is a brutal honesty in her lyrics that reveal a bruised innocence, backed with an increasingly muscular instrumentation that creeps up and surprises.

Themes reflect her own life as her fame has skyrocketed in a posed self-deprecating and laconic style – ‘Nameless Faceless’ turns the mirror back on the keyboard warriors who denigrate her music:

Don’t you have anything better to do,
I wish that someone could hug you,
must be lonely being angry, feeling overlooked,
you sit alone at home in the darkness,
with all your pent up rage that you harness
I’m real sorry,
About whatever happened to you

‘City Looks Pretty’ reflects on Barnett’s growing fame and the effects on her personal life: ‘friends treat you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend’. Despite the downbeat theme it is a bright, lilting tune which showcase Barnett’s often looked guitar skills.

We already reviewed ‘Need a Little Time’ which follows similar themes: “I don’t know a lot about you but, you seem to know a lot about me so, I take a little time out…’:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TISIPNpRuoY]

Barnett also reflects on the impact of her fame on her personal relationship with her partner, Jen Cloher, an accomplished musician in her own right:

Say what you want
Don’t got a lot
Oh but what I got
I’d give it all away

Lyrically, the entire album is certainly engaging and entertaining but the strength of the melodies and instrumentation create a magnificent album as a whole. Barnett has maintained her lyrical qualities that made her so special in the first place, but has further enhanced this with a greater melodic and pop sensibility. It is personal, intimate, and enthralling yet has a powerful enervating anthemic pulse: it rocks with intelligence and sensitivity.